Pages

Friday, 16 May 2014

咲- / Saki- (season 1)

I
haven’t the faintest idea how to play Mahjong. You sit around a table, taking
it in turns to draw tiles and trying to make hands that you have to memorize.
You set these up by putting tiles on one side of the table, and there are
advantages and disadvantages to being the dealer. Throwing in sticks ups the
stakes. And there are also some dice in the middle, but I have no idea what
for. Even after watching Saki, I would still call myself almost entirely
unaware of how Mahjong works.

But
I am aware of how sports anime work – encompassing competitive board games –
and after all I knew nothing about go when I started Hikaru no Go, and
that became my favourite manga of all time. Knowing that I would probably enjoy
the way the anime worked, I got hold of Saki, though soon forgot that I
had it, so that when I started to watch I had entirely forgotten that it was a
mahjong anime – for all I remembered, it was going to be about H.H. Munro.

But
no. Based on a Young Ganganmanga, it is a typical but nonetheless
highly enjoyable sports anime. It follows a tried-and-tested formula: a rather
ordinary young person reveals an uncanny talent for a competitive game in front
of an established top youth player. The youth player becomes a bit obsessive –
with a hint of romantic attraction – and manages to coax the peculiarly
talented one into playing competitively. Though there is a hint of rivalry, the
series settles into a series of matches in a competition format, with the
sympathetic team encountering opponents with unusual approaches to the game,
and after reaching some inner revelation, overcoming the challenge. Meanwhile,
the simple actions of the game become highly dramatised, so that the power of
moves may be represented by strikes of lightning, visions of mighty creatures
or sudden changes in air pressure. This is almost exactly the formula Hikaru
no Go had.

But
for all the similarity in outline, Saki is very different in feel from HikaGo.
With its predominantly female cast, cutesy art style and readiness to have
really bizarre character types – including a girl so hard to notice that even
her tiles begin to disappear, and a tiny loli who is effectively kept chained
up for her immense mahjong prowess – it is rather more like Bamboo Blade.
There’s also a propensity to put all the characters into romantic pairs – all
but the goofy main guy and the childish teammate being lesbian pairings – that
owes something to Maria-sama Ga Miteru, though with about a fiftieth of the subtlety and gentleness. This
is a series happy to send its almost all-female cast off to bathhouses and hot
springs so that they all get naked together, and does
not hesitate to use the old trip-over-and-fall-on-top-of-the-one-you-like
conceit.

But
that Saki doesn’t mind being a bit lowbrow about its presentation is
part of why it’s so much fun. It’s bold and obvious and very obviously geared
towards otaku tastes – but that’s why it has an infectious exuberance. It’s
just enjoyable to watch, enjoyable to rush through and enjoyable to laugh along
with. It’s not trying to change the world or to offer something new and daring,
but wants its audience to enjoy – and I certainly did.

It’s
no Hikaru no Go – it doesn’t have the sincerity that allows for much
more heightened emotion, but then again anyone who might find HikaGo tedious
would be better-served here. I think mahjong is fundamentally less-suited to
this sort of presentation anyway, being much more luck-based, whereas go has no
random factor. Mahjong is evidently about trending towards winning rather than
winning every time, but that’s not what this anime shows, and even with my lack
of knowledge I know that a lot of the amazing winning hands shown are amazing
because they involve ridiculous luck, not just in arranging your hand but in
picking a random tile to complete it.

Since
I know nothing about mahjong, though, it doesn’t really matter to me how
realistic the presentation is. What I enjoy is the absurdity, and the sense of
triumph when a character wins. The anime is also very, very good at making the
audience root for every character it gives a background to, when of course only
one player can win.

This
was only the first of three seasons. There is very little sense of closure here
– it’s made clear the national tournament is the real goal of these characters,
and this entire 25-episode series, after the exposition, is about the
qualifying tournament to get to the nationals rather than the tournament
itself. It also seems that when Studio Gokumi split off from Gonzo, they took Saki
with them, so after this there comes a change in studio – if not staff. I may
not swallow it up quite so ravenously, but I will certainly be watching the
rest of Saki

No comments:

Post a Comment

Welcome to Adziu's small corner

Welcome to my little blog, here in this small corner.
Over the years I have seen a few hundred animated series and movies, and the purpose of this blog is to house my impressions. This is not intended to be a daily blog with impressions of each episode: I write my thoughts only after viewing something complete. Several have been imported from previous blogs dating back to 2005 - as well as drawing from journals from as early as 1999!
Now, please do sit, enjoy the fire, have a mug of something warm and put in a comment or two.